Briefly, what are the main, and I imagine wide-ranging, challenges for contemporary system administrators?

There are two main emergent challenges. First, is operational efficiency. This means thinking about how can we measure what we do, so that we know what we are actually doing, and improve it over time. Monitoring and measurement becomes important when there are more devices than we can count on our fingers. I see many "green computing" articles today but the ones that have credibility include hard numbers, measured in the real world (not test labs or simulations or theories), that let me be the judge of just how efficient a product is as compared to what I'm doing today. We can make guesses about operational efficiency by looking at costs, but that is often an approximation: I worked at one place that considered electricity to be "free" because some other department paid for it. I think most companies don't have financial systems that give the proper granularity to measure power efficiency, nor efficiencies of labour, time or customer satisfaction. Direct measurements are the best. The trick is to create a service level agreement (SLA) for every service then directly collect metrics to determine how close to the SLA we comply. Then we have the numbers that let us determine which SLAs should be tightened or loosened. That is all a lot of work! The second is about personal efficiency. This means looking at how can we organise our work so that we get the most done, in a stress-free manner, so that we "play well with others". There are many impediments to this, sometimes artificially introduced by incompetent management, dysfunctional processes, or badly managed expectations. Worst of all, we receive little mentoring about time management in school or from our managers. Hey, that's why I wrote Time Management for System Administrators!

You were in Australia last year for a SAGE conference, and you have been several times in years past. You must have built up a few impressions of the place?

This will be my fourth trip to Australia. I've enjoyed every visit! On my first visit to Australia, I had some problems understanding the language. The language barrier is similar to a non-technical person calling an IT helpdesk: both parties are speaking English, but they can't understand each other. Eventually I've learned to use Australian terms much the same way that someone calling an IT helpdesk learns to call their mouse a mouse, not "the thingy that moves the cursor". When travelling I dine out a lot and I've had confusion because the parts of a meal (entree, main, etc.) are called different things than in the US. There are more embarrassing examples, but that's all I'll reveal for now.